July product updates

@Rose_K I’m not opposed to these nice little tweaks & refinements to the platform (even though nobody was asking for these). However, 2 things:

#1. The new view menu comes with a variety of problems, as I discuss in this video I created a few weeks ago (and sent to support a few weeks ago):

#2. Is there any movement on tweaking & refining the parts of the product that ACTUALLY need tweaking that are causing people to leave the platform, and that people have ACTUALLY been clamoring for for years in the forums?

For example, you guys have lost 2 of my clients in July due to these issues, which has also lost me income as an Airtable consultant:

• No ability to resize the height of column headers.


• No ability for linked record fields to display the linked records in reverse chronological order.


• Mobile shared/embedded views don’t allow for sorting, searching, grouping, or filtering.

There are many more issues than this, but these are the ones that caused my clients to leave the platform in July.

I deal with this issue by using a scripting automation that sorts the linked record field by the desired child field.

Can you share the script that you use to do this? This would be immensely useful to my client.

Scripting solves everything of course, but for these kind of features, isn’t that beyond the point of Airtable? Trying to be accessible and all… :man_shrugging:

This is an excellent point, and I fully agree. Airtable THINKS that the answer to everything is “Use JavaScript!” But in reality, the answer for 99% of people is “Switch to a different platform.” People don’t want to learn a programming language to use a “low code” / “no code” product. That misses the whole point of Airtable.

It’s disappointing that Airtable doesn’t actually respond to what customers need & want, but that their engineers are independently handpicking their own pet projects to work on. As far as I can tell, not a single person in these forums — nor any of my customers — have ever requested any of these July changes in the last 6 years.

This is the problem with Airtable: their continued deafness, and unwillingness to listen.

Also: don’t want to pay a consultant to write it for them :winking_face: I don’t know how to script, but every time I tell a potential client that “I will ask my IT partner to write a script for this or that”, they are thrown back to the reason they want to try Airtable in the first place: to not need an IT specialist every time they want something “simple” done in/on their platform… For them, it’s already difficult and challenging enough to change from Excels or another platform to a new Airtable one.

Can you share the script that you use to do this? This would be immensely useful to my client.

This is an excellent point, and I fully agree. Airtable THINKS that the answer to everything is “Use JavaScript!” But in reality, the answer for 99% of people is “Switch to a different platform.” People don’t want to learn a programming language to use a “low code” / “no code” product. That misses the whole point of Airtable.

It’s disappointing that Airtable doesn’t actually respond to what customers need & want, but that their engineers are independently handpicking their own pet projects to work on. As far as I can tell, not a single person in these forums — nor any of my customers — have ever requested any of these July changes in the last 6 years.

This is the problem with Airtable: their continued deafness, and unwillingness to listen.

@Rose_K I’m not opposed to these nice little tweaks & refinements to the platform (even though nobody was asking for these). However, 2 things:

#1. The new view menu comes with a variety of problems, as I discuss in this video I created a few weeks ago (and sent to support a few weeks ago):

#2. Is there any movement on tweaking & refining the parts of the product that ACTUALLY need tweaking that are causing people to leave the platform, and that people have ACTUALLY been clamoring for for years in the forums?

For example, you guys have lost 2 of my clients in July due to these issues, which has also lost me income as an Airtable consultant:

• No ability to resize the height of column headers.


• No ability for linked record fields to display the linked records in reverse chronological order.


• Mobile shared/embedded views don’t allow for sorting, searching, grouping, or filtering.

There are many more issues than this, but these are the ones that caused my clients to leave the platform in July.

You’re exaggerating again. People have wanted better ways to manage frequently used views, and people have been confused by new records jumping around in sorted/filtered views. People may not have explicitly asked for previewing emails sent by automations, but it is a very welcome features and very helpful.

Plus, I suspect that Airtable priorities its feature development more on feedback from other sources than this community, such as usability testing and customer support interactions.

The only conceivable explanation I can think of besides laziness is that Airtable thinks such customizability of the headers will lead to “bloated” bases due to user negligence. This is the cited reason why we cannot have dynamic row height (which still does not explain why we don’t have dynamic row height <= 6 lines). The consequence is that our bases are either bloated horizontally or incredibly cryptic due to use of abbreviations and emojis. This and the lack of formula Linked Records (or at least automatic linked records, so we don’t have to use the API or automations to set up a universal linker for every record) are two fundamental flaws of Airtable that lose it customers every day. I just don’t understand what they’re thinking.

You’re exaggerating again. People have wanted better ways to manage frequently used views, and people have been confused by new records jumping around in sorted/filtered views. People may not have explicitly asked for previewing emails sent by automations, but it is a very welcome features and very helpful.

Plus, I suspect that Airtable priorities its feature development more on feedback from other sources than this community, such as usability testing and customer support interactions.

By the way, BOTH of these scenarios can be true at the same time. These 2 scenarios are not mutually exclusive:

1. 
   

   I am very grateful for the nice improvements in the July update. :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:

   
   


2. 
   

   I am very frustrated with the lack of communication regarding much-needed feature requests that have been ongoing in these forums & support emails for years. (Proof of this: when is the last time an Airtable employee has ever responded in the #show-and-tell:product-suggestions category?)

   
   

Even a simple reply like: “We are never planning on increasing the 50,000 record limit” could go a long way towards easing frustrations over certain pain points.

Sad but true. Luckily, I have a few clients who are paying for enterprise, so I’ve had them submit feature requests that my smaller customers need (or needed, before they left Airtable). Not sure if it will make a difference or not, but we’ll see.

Very controversial updates Rose! Too early in the week to be stoking the passions of our regulars!

I think this is not a black & white thing,

I´m sure they have some reasons to create these updates, and some of them are good enough to consider them valuable.

What I think is not taking into consideration is that many updates are dependant on other changes.

When building a SaaS, you cannot select the requirements by using a list; you have predecessor tasks.

As an example, they cannot change the security schema because they are stuck with loading every record in memory when you open a base.

All these changes depend on some other things; I notice this whenever I have the opportunity to chat with the Airtable team.

I´m pretty sure they want to fulfill every single feature request, but I´m also pretty sure they cannot do it, and they wouldn´t open publicly admit it, as it implies recognizing a poor design from the beginning.

Also, a community forum is a lousy way to collect feedback and be transparent about the changes. There are tons of options that provide options to the community to post an idea, vote on it, and update changes (even options built with Airtable btw).

Complaining about feature requests is a recurring thing that I read every month, they need a better way to collect the feature requests.

The root problem is not fulfilling every feature request; the problem here is more related to transparency and accountability. That´s where Airtable falls very short and should focus their work.

Of course, for us who we code, we can solve everything with code, and I´m super happy with Airtable, as I can offer my clients everything they want and need.

But I completely understand that there is a gap for the final user (the ultimate goal for airtable) or consultants that don´t code, but I´m sure that gap will be closing more and more with the pass of time.

Sergio

This is an excellent point, and I fully agree. Airtable THINKS that the answer to everything is “Use JavaScript!” But in reality, the answer for 99% of people is “Switch to a different platform.” People don’t want to learn a programming language to use a “low code” / “no code” product. That misses the whole point of Airtable.

It’s disappointing that Airtable doesn’t actually respond to what customers need & want, but that their engineers are independently handpicking their own pet projects to work on. As far as I can tell, not a single person in these forums — nor any of my customers — have ever requested any of these July changes in the last 6 years.

This is the problem with Airtable: their continued deafness, and unwillingness to listen.

This is an excellent point, and I fully agree. Airtable THINKS that the answer to everything is “Use JavaScript!” But in reality, the answer for 99% of people is “Switch to a different platform.” People don’t want to learn a programming language to use a “low code” / “no code” product. That misses the whole point of Airtable.

It’s disappointing that Airtable doesn’t actually respond to what customers need & want, but that their engineers are independently handpicking their own pet projects to work on. As far as I can tell, not a single person in these forums — nor any of my customers — have ever requested any of these July changes in the last 6 years.

This is the problem with Airtable: their continued deafness, and unwillingness to listen.

Hey … I requested the Automation improvements mentioned a few weeks ago.

And I gotta say, Airtable Devs rock! Thanks so much for adding these improvements!!! :partying_face: :partying_face: :partying_face: And thanks to the July improvements, they solved a very annoying problem that I was having building monthly draft reports.

That said, Airtable would turn to mush very, very quickly, if they implemented every idea that comes through the feature-request gate. No doubt that they have to sift through countless ideas, figure out the good ones, and what-will-break-what etc. There’s a LOT of work goes into feature request development - and the classic example is your initial post where, Airtable bring about improvements to the View, and then boom, it’s broken something that you, and possibly only you care about. But so long as you capture the problem, give them feed-back, discuss workarounds, that’s all we can do really.

It’s important to give devs kudos too. We all have challenges we face (especially considering what’s going on in the world right now) and our working days can be long and hard. I for one am grateful for what Airtable Devs brought us in July - and can’t wait to see what’s new for August.

Touching on scripting too - I hadn’t written a line of Javascript code in my life before June 2021. And now after I’ve spent the last few weekend mornings learning (with the odd stupid request to Airtable support, and I thank you them for their patience ), I now have a Base with automated Job Queues that process tables, sift through records, update status of tasks in the evenings, delete completed jobs, email me daily, weekly, monthly. It’s awesome!!! If you too are new to scripting, you just have to believe in yourself that you can do it and then make the time to start learning and understanding. All programming is about breaking down the problem into smaller problems and solving those smaller problems that will then solve the bigger problem.

And this is one thing that Airtable could improve, in that many of their Scripting examples and doco are simply too much to understand for the absolute beginner user, and they would help many of us if they wrote some babies-first-steps JS tutorials of how to write/update/delete a record using Scripting within an Automation. But the info is there, now, and waiting for anyone who wants it.

I think Airtable would “turn to mush very, very quickly” (I’m exaggerating) if they didn’t have this and other strong communities (read: non Airtable employees helping out other users for free in their free time). As we are also selling their product and seeing first hand what/why and how things could/should improve, I can understand that the (let’s be honest; compare it with a company like Butter for instance) minimal level of communication from Airtable about their plans is frustrating for some. Airtable should value the fact that users like @ScottWorld -in his own way no doubt- voices how real users interact with their product and what shortcomings makes them leave.

It would be a mistake to think that any criticism is directed at the individual dev level, rather than the company they represent on this forum. Now, I see that Airtable has hired a “head of community” 2 months ago (she isn’t on this forum yet I think…), so we can only hope that she will make a contribution in how Airtable communicates with her community members.

Just my 2 cents, with respect to all of course